Skin Tight

  Again, the faceless voice from behind the TV camera: “Did you kill that girl?”

  The black eye of the beast peered closer, revolving clockwise in its socket—Willie, remembering Ray’s instructions to zoom tight on Rudy’s face. The surgeon stomped on the suction pedal as if he were squashing a centipede. The motor thrummed. The tube twitched. The glass jar filled.

  Time to stop.

  Time to stop!

  But Dr. Rudy Graveline did not stop.

  He kept on poking and sucking . . . the long hungry snout of the mechanical anteater slurping through the pit of Reynaldo’s abdomen . . . down, down, down through the fascia and the muscle . . . snorkeling past the intestines, nipping at the transverse colon . . . down, down, down the magic anteater burrowed.

  Until it glomped the aorta.

  And the plastic tube coming out of Reynaldo’s navel suddenly turned bright red.

  The jar at the other end turned red.

  Even the doctor’s arm turned red.

  Willie watched it all through the camera’s eye. The whole place, turning red.

  CHAPTER 31

  THE first thing Chemo bought with Rudy’s money was a portable phone for the Bonneville. No sooner was it out of the box than Maggie Gonzalez remarked, “This stupid toy is worth more than the car.”

  Chemo said, “I need a private line. You’ll see.”

  They were driving back to the Holiday Inn after spending the morning at the office of Dr. George Ginger, the plastic surgeon. Maggie knew Dr. Ginger from the early days as one of Rudy’s more competent underlings at the Durkos Center. She trusted George’s skill and his discretion. He could be maddeningly slow, and he had terrible breath, but technically he was about as good as cosmetic surgeons come.

  Chemo had prefaced the visit to Dr. Ginger with this warning to Maggie: “If he messes up my face, I’ll kill him on the spot. And then I’ll kill you.”

  The second thing that Chemo had bought with Rudy’s money was a box of bullets for the rusty Colt .38. Brand-new rounds, Federals. The good stuff.

  Maggie had said, “You’re going into this with the wrong attitude.”

  Chemo frowned. “I’ve had rotten luck with doctors.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “I don’t even like this guy’s name, George Ginger. Sounds like a fag name to me.” Then he had checked the chambers on the Colt and slipped it into his pants.

  “You’re hopeless,” Maggie had said. “I don’t know why I even bother.”

  “Because otherwise I’ll shoot you.”

  Fortunately the dermabrasion went smoothly. Dr. George Ginger had never seen a burn case quite like Chemo’s, but he wisely refrained from inquiry. Once, when Chemo wasn’t looking, the surgeon snuck a peek at the cumbersome prosthesis attached to the patient’s left arm. An avid gardener, Dr. Ginger recognized the Weed Whacker instantly, but resisted the impulse to pry.

  The sanding procedure took about two hours, and Chemo endured stoically, without so much as a whimper. When it was over, he no longer looked as if someone had glued Rice Krispies all over his face. Rather, he looked as if he had been dragged for five miles behind a speeding dump truck.

  His forehead, his cheeks, his nose, his chin all glowed with a raw, pink, oozing sheen. The spackled damage of the errant electrolysis needle had been scraped away forever, but now it was up to Chemo to grow a new skin. While he might never enjoy the radiant peachy complexion of, say, a Christie Brinkley, at least he would be able to stroll through an airport or a supermarket or a public park without causing small children to cringe behind their mothers’ skirts. Chemo conceded that this alone would be a vast improvement, socially.

  Before leaving the office, Maggie Gonzalez had asked Dr. George Ginger to remove her sutures and inspect the progress of her New York face-lift. He reported—with toxic breath—that everything was healing nicely, and gave Maggie a makeup mirror to look for herself. She was pleased by what she saw: The angry purple bruises were fading shadows under the eyes, and the incision scars had shrunk to tender rosy lines. She was especially delighted with her perky new nose.

  Dr. Ginger studied the still-swollen promontory from several angles and nodded knowingly. “The Sandy Duncan.”

  Maggie smiled. “Exactly!”

  Popping a codeine Tylenol, Chemo said, “Who the fuck is Sandy Duncan?”

  In the Bonneville, on the way back to the motel, Chemo remarked, “Three grand seems like a lot for what he did.”

  “All he did was make you look human again,” Maggie said. “Three grand was a bargain, if you ask me. Besides, he even gave a professional discount—fifteen percent off because I’m a nurse.”

  As he steered, Chemo kept leaning toward the middle of the seat to check himself in the rearview. It was difficult to judge the result of the dermabrasion, since his face was slathered in a glue-colored ointment. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s still pretty broken out.”

  Maggie thought: Broken out? It’s seeping, for God’s sake. “You heard what the doctor said. Give it a couple weeks to heal.” With that, she leaned over and commandeered the rearview to examine her own refurbished features.

  A beep-beep noise came chirping out of the dashboard; the car phone. With a simian arm Chemo reached into the glove compartment and snatched it on the second ring.

  With well-acted nonchalance, he wedged the receiver between his ear and his left shoulder. Maggie thought it looked ridiculous to be riding in a junker like this and talking on a fancy car phone. Embarrassed, she scooted lower in the seat.

  “Hullo,” Chemo said into the phone.

  “Hello, Funny Face.” It was Mick Stranahan. “I got your message.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “And you said to call, so I am.”

  Chemo was puzzled at Stranahan’s insulting tone of voice. The man ought to be scared. Desperate. Begging. At least polite.

  Chemo said, “I got your lady friend.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I read the note.”

  “So, you’re waiting to hear my demands.”

  “No,” said Stranahan. “I’m waiting to hear you sing the fucking aria from Madame Butterfly . . . Of course I want to hear your demands.”

  “Christ, you’re in a shitty mood.”

  “I can barely hear you,” Stranahan complained. “Don’t tell me you got one of those yuppie Mattel car phones.”

  “It’s a Panasonic,” Chemo said, sharply.

  Maggie looked over at him with an impatient expression, as if to say: Get on with it.

  As he braked for a stoplight, the phone slipped from Chemo’s ear. He took his good hand off the wheel to grab for it.

  “Hell!” The receiver was gooey with the antibiotic ointment from his cheeks.

  Stranahan’s voice cracked through the static. “Now what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. Not a damn thing.” Chemo carefully propped the receiver on his shoulder. “Look, here’s the deal. You want to see your lady friend alive, meet me at the marina at midnight tonight.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Huh?”

  “That means no, Funny Face. No marina. I know what you want and you can have it. Me for her, right?”

  “Right.” Chemo figured there was no sense trying to bullshit this guy.

  “It’s a deal,” Stranahan said, “but I’m not going anywhere. You come to me.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m at a pay phone on Bayshore Drive, but I won’t be here long.”

  Impatiently Chemo said, “So where’s the meet?”

  “My place.”

  “That house? No fucking way.”

  “ ’Fraid so.”

  The car phone started sliding again. Chemo groped frantically for it, and the Bonneville began to weave off the road. Maggie reached over and steadied the wheel.

  Chemo got a grip on the receiver and snarled into it: “You hear what I said? No way am I going back to
that damn stilt house.”

  “Yes, you are. You’ll be getting another call with more information.”

  “Tell me now!”

  “I can’t,” Stranahan said.

  “I’ll kill the Marks girl, I swear.”

  “You’re not quite that stupid, are you?”

  The hot flush of anger made Chemo’s face sting even worse. He said, “We’ll talk about this later. What time you gonna call?”

  “Oh, not me,” Mick Stranahan said. “I won’t be the one calling back.”

  “Then who?” Chemo demanded.

  But the line had gone dead.

  WILLIE played the videotape for his friend at the NBC affiliate in Miami. Willie’s friend was sufficiently impressed by the blood on his shirt to let him use one of the editing rooms. “You gotta see this,” Willie said.

  He punched the tape into the machine and sat back to chew on his knuckles. He felt like an orphan. No Christina, no Reynaldo. He knew he should call New York, but he didn’t know what to say or who to tell.

  Willie’s friend, who was a local news producer, pointed to the monitor. “Where’s that?” he asked.

  “Surgery clinic over in Bal Harbour. That’s the waiting room.”

  The friend said. “You were portable?”

  “Right. Solo the whole way.”

  “So where’s Flemm? That doesn’t look like him.”

  “No, that’s somebody else.” The monitor showed an operating room where a tall bald doctor was hunched over a chubby female patient. The bald doctor was gesticulating angrily at the camera and barking for a nurse to call the authorities. “I don’t know who that was,” Willie said. “Wrong room.”

  “Now you’re back in the hallway, walking. People are yelling, covering their faces.”

  “Yeah, but here it comes,” Willie said, leaning forward. “Bingo. That’s Ray on the table.”

  “Jeez, what’re they doing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It looks like a goddamn Caesarean.”

  Willie said, “Yeah, but it was supposed to be a nose job.”

  “Go on!”

  The audio portion of the tape grew louder.

  “Yeah, that’s him!”

  “Who? That’s Ray?”

  “Reynaldo Flemm.”

  “I told you he looked familiar.”

  “Who? Reynaldo who?”

  “That guy from the TV.”

  “This has gone far enough. . . .”

  When the frame filled with Reynaldo Flemm’s gaping muzzled face, Willie’s friend hit the Pause button and said, “Fucker never looked better.”

  “You know him?”

  “I knew him back from Philadelphia. Back when he was still Ray Fleming.”

  “You’re kidding,” Willie said.

  “No, man, that’s his real name. Raymond Fleming. Then he got on this bi-ethnic kick . . . ‘Reynaldo Flemm’—half Latin, half Eastern bloc. Told everybody in the business that his mother was a Cuban refugee and his father was with the Yugoslavian resistance. Shit, I laugh about it but that’s when his career really took off.”

  Willie said, “Romania. What he told me, his old man was with the Romanian underground.”

  “His old man sold Whirlpools in Larchmont, I know for a fact. Let’s see the rest.”

  Willie pressed the Fast Forward and squeaked the tape past the part when he confronted Dr. Rudy Graveline about Victoria Barletta; he didn’t want his producer friend to hear the dead woman’s name, on the offchance that the story could be salvaged. Willie slowed the tape to normal speed just as he zoomed in on the doctor’s quavering eyes.

  “Boris Karloff,” said Willie’s friend.

  “Watch.”

  The camera angle widened to show Rudy Graveline feverishly toiling over Reynaldo’s belly. Then came a mist of blood, and one of the nurses began shouting for the surgeon to stop.

  “Geez,” said Willie’s friend, looking slightly queasy. “What’s happening?”

  The doctor abruptly wheeled from the operating table to confront the camera directly. In his bloody right hand was a wicked-looking instrument connected to a long plastic tube. The device was making an audible slurp-slurp noise.

  “Your turn, fat boy!”

  Willie’s friend gestured at the monitor and said: “He called you fat boy?”

  “Watch!”

  On the screen, the surgeon lunged forward with the pointy slurp-slurping device. There was a cry, a dull clunk. Then the picture got jerky and went gray.

  Willie pressed the Stop button. “I hauled ass,” he explained to his friend. “He came at me with that sucking . . . thing, so I took off.”

  “Don’t blame you, man. But what about Ray?”

  Willie took the videotape out of the editing console. “That’s what’s got me scared. I get in the van and take off, right? Stop at the nearest phone booth and call this clinic. Whispering Palms is the name.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard of it.”

  “So I call. Don’t say who I am. I ask about Reynaldo Flemm. I say he’s my brother. I’m s’posed to pick him up after the operation. Ask can I come by and get him. Nurse gets on the line and wants to know what’s going on. She wants to know how come Ray was using a phony name when he checks in at the place. Johnny Tiger, some shit like that. I tell her I haven’t got the faintest—maybe he was embarrassed, didn’t want his nose job to turn up in the gossip columns. Then she says, well, he’s not here. She says the doctor, this Rudy Graveline, the nurse says he drove Ray to Mount Sinai. She says she’s not allowed to say anything more on the phone. So I haul ass over to Emergency at Sinai and guess what? No Ray anywhere. Fact there’s nothing but strokes and heart attacks. No Reynaldo Flemm!”

  Willie’s friend said, “This is too fucking weird. Even for Miami.”

  “Best part is, now I gotta call New York and break the news.”

  “Oh, man.”

  Willie said, “Maybe I’ll ship the tape first.”

  “Might as well,” agreed the producer. “What about Ray? Think he’s all right?”

  “No,” said Willie. “You want the truth, I’d be fucking amazed if he was all right.”

  THE nurses had wanted to call 911, but Rudy Graveline had said no, there wasn’t time. I’ll take him myself, Rudy had said. He had run to the parking lot (stopping only at the front desk to pick up Reynaldo’s $15,000), got the Jag and pulled up at the staff entrance.

  Back in the operating suite, the anesthetist had said: “Everything’s going flat.”

  “Then hurry, goddammit!”

  They had gotten Reynaldo on a gurney and wheeled him to Rudy’s car and bundled him in the passenger seat. The scrub nurse even tried to hook up the safety belt.

  “Oh, forget it,” Rudy had said.

  “But it’s a law.”

  “Go back to work!” Rudy had commanded. The Jaguar had peeled rubber on its way out.

  Naturally he had no intention of driving to Mount Sinai Hospital. What was the point? Rudy glanced at the man in the passenger seat and still did not recognize him from television. True, Reynaldo Flemm was not at his telegenic best. His eyes were half-closed, his mouth was half-open, and his skin was the color of bad veal.

  He was also exsanguinating all over Rudy’s fine leather seats and burled walnut door panels. “Great,” Rudy muttered. “What else.” As the surgeon sped south on Alton Road, he took out the portable telephone and called his brother’s tree company.

  “George Graveline, please. It’s an emergency.”

  “Uh, he’s not here.”

  “This is his brother. Where’s he working today?”

  The line clicked. Rudy thought he had been cut off. Then a lady from an answering service came on and asked him to leave his number. Rudy hollered, but she wouldn’t budge. Finally he surrendered the number and hung up.

  He thought: I must find George and his wood-chipping machine. This is very dicey, driving around Miami Beach in a $47,000 sedan with a dead TV star i
n the front seat. Bleeding on the front seat.

  The car phone beeped and Rudy grabbed at it in frantic optimism. “George!”

  “No, Dr. Graveline.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Sergeant García, Metro Homicide. You probably don’t remember, but we met that night the mysterious midget Haitian blew up your car.”

  Rudy’s heart was pounding. Should he hang up? Did the cops know about Flemm already? But how—the nurses? Maybe that moron with the minicam!

  Al García said: “I got some bad news about your brother George.”

  Rudy’s mind was racing. The detective’s words didn’t register. “What—could you give me that again?”

  “I said I got bad news about George. He’s dead.”

  Rudy’s foot came off the accelerator. He was coasting now, trying to think. Which way? Where?

  García went on: “He tried to kill a man and I had to shoot him. Internal Review has the full report, so I suggest you talk to them.”

  Nothing.

  “Doctor? You there?”

  “Yuh.”

  No questions, nothing.

  “The way it went down, I had no choice.”

  Rudy said dully, “I understand.” He was thinking: It’s awful about George, yes, but what am I going to do with this dead person in my Jaguar?

  García could sense that something strange was going on at the end of the line. He said, “Look, I know it’s a bad time, but we’ve got to talk about a homicide. A homicide that may involve you and your brother. I’d like to come over to the clinic as soon as possible.”

  “Make it tomorrow,” Rudy said.

  “It’s about Victoria Barletta.”

  “I’m eager to help in any way I can. Come see me tomorrow.” The surgeon sounded like a zombie. A heavily sedated zombie. If there was a realm beyond sheer panic, Rudy Graveline had entered it.

  “Doctor, it really can’t wait—”

  “For heaven’s sake, Sergeant, give me some time. I just found out my brother’s dead, I need to make the arrangements.”

  “To be blunt,” García said, “as far as George goes, there’s not a whole lot left to arrange.”

  “Call me tomorrow,” Rudy Graveline said curtly. Then he threw the car phone out the window.